


Their Offers Should Not Charm Us

by FrenchTwistResistance



Category: Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (TV 2018)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-18
Updated: 2019-04-18
Packaged: 2020-01-15 20:14:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,091
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18506272
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FrenchTwistResistance/pseuds/FrenchTwistResistance
Summary: Hilda poisons people who displease Zelda.





	Their Offers Should Not Charm Us

Cyanide is a fun poison, but it’s not Hilda’s favorite.

Arsenic is also fun but tends to be grainy and metallic and therefore noticeable—not as fun.

Thallium is great but hard to come by these days in this regulated era.

Radium is just cruel and anyway takes too long. 

Methyl alcohol is neat but unreliable.

Carbon monoxide is her fave. But it’s harder now to manufacture a plausible scenario with so many electric appliances.

As Hilda decides what to do with Shirley Jackson, she thinks back to what she’d done with Gwen Waterhouse.

xxx

Gwen had been a beautiful brunette. Tall and languid, her limbs so fluid and flexible. Hilda had wanted to fuck her. And Gwen had often hinted that maybe that had been an option. She had flirted with Hilda even as she had shunned and insulted Zelda.

That could have been the end of it. An uneasy equilibrium. But no.

They were all—Hilda and Zelda and Gwen and a dozen others besides—part of an artsy witch community exchanging ideas and fluids across the continent in the wild years after the First World War. 

xxx

It had started in London, where Hilda had previously been content to keep the home fires burning. But she had been pretty easily convinced to go gallivanting afterward—to shorten her skirt and bob her hair and follow Zelda wherever she might fancy to go.

A few days after the armistice, Zelda had wafted into the kitchen, said,

“Pack a bag, darling sister. We’ve an appointment in Paris.”

There had been no appointment in Paris except that Zelda had wanted to go there.

There were parties and salons. There were balls and exhibitions. There was a small selection of potted plants on a tiny terrace that Hilda could tend.

There were symposiums. 

Finally, at least on the fringes, women were being accepted into the more technical and theoretical corners of medicine.

Hilda and Zelda were both midwives, of course, but Zelda had set her eyes toward the wider medical field, where birth was misogynistically seen as an unfortunate but natural necessity rather than an art and science. Regardless or perhaps because of her own feelings, Zelda had gravitated toward academic conferences and symposiums, aimed to prove her knowledge.

And those symposiums almost always included Gwen Waterhouse, a newly minted doctor and pseudo-intellectual expatriate from America, who somehow always found herself debating Zelda after the actual event. Who somehow could always be found forgoing actual arguments and resorting to ad hominem attacks. Insinuating and infuriating. Hilda listened to their debates and very well knew they both argued the same points but with different words.

Hilda liked that someone almost worthy opposed Zelda. But she didn’t like the way she did it. It wasn’t honest. It wasn’t genuine. But it was sexy that she did it at all.

Hilda continued the flirtation. It was good practice if nothing else. And Hilda had thought at first it was all in good fun. Different sides of the same coin.

xxx

Paris then Prague then Berlin.

Hilda went wherever Zelda went. It was fun, and she didn’t have anything better to do; anyway, Zelda took suggestions if they were presented correctly, and that had been how Prague had ended up in the mix. They were a team, after all.

Hilda learned a lot about midwifery and art and people and how to tend plants on small terraces. 

She learned a lot of new dance moves and a lot of new kissing techniques.

Zelda encouraged the former, didn’t acknowledge that Hilda had been indulging in the latter but probably would have encouraged that, too, if that were something they discussed. But they seemed to pointedly not discuss it, which was fine by both of them. They both stayed out late, and whether they were together or separate for the evening, they always came home to each other.

xxx

It was 1923, a smoky jazz bar in Brussels. And the final straw.

Gwen sidled in close to Hilda in a dark booth. She hadn’t been present in Prague. An intermittent presence in Berlin. And now a constant figure in Brussels. Always flitting around to put in a cutting remark toward Zelda and a sly wink toward Hilda.

Zelda was dancing a yard or two in front of them with a man in a well-cut three-piece suit.

“Are you jealous, ma belle?” Gwen said.

“Of what?” Hilda said. Gwen made a sweeping hand gesture toward the dance floor, said,

“That awful person.”

Hilda looked. Blinked. Looked again. Said honestly,

“No. I’m not jealous.”

Gwen smirked, and even in the low light her red lips and white teeth gleamed. She said,

“Regardless, she is awful. And I will ruin her.”

“How?” Hilda said, as intrigued as she was incensed.

“By ruining you, of course.” Gwen’s eyebrows raised, and her red mouth was smirking. Hilda allowed this and then,

“But ma chèrie, what might you have against her?” Gwen looked at her.

“She’s always gotten what she wanted. But now she won’t.”

Hilda didn’t want to ignite, but she did anyway. Gwen Waterhouse didn’t know anything about her life, but she was presuming so much, assuming so much, intruding on so much that wasn’t her business.

“She’s always gotten what she wanted. But she won’t get me?” Hilda said. She’d become very good at acting, reciting lines, anticipating reactions.

“Exactly,” Gwen said.

“Why don’t you come to my room, then?” Hilda said.

Gwen did. 

They kissed for a while, groped and groaned a tad.

Hilda had wanted to fuck her. But now she wanted that in a more metaphorical way than a physical way, and she was very good at controlling herself. Well. She was good at controlling certain hormonal impulses, anyway.

Hilda said,

“I need the loo. I’ll put on a kettle on my way. I’ve got a plate of biscuits yet, too.”

Hilda did not need the loo, nor did she really put a kettle on. But it might have looked like both to a medical examiner. It very well might have looked as though the kettle had boiled over and extinguished the flame of the gas stove so that the gas still escaping very accidentally subsumed Gwen Waterhouse. 

Carbon monoxide had long since been Hilda’s fave.

xxx

But now there is Shirley Jackson.

Hilda infiltrates the way she always does: a pretty blonde offering delicious baked goods.

Shirley Jackson wants to ruin Zelda.

Shirley Jackson wants to fuck Hilda.

How fortuitous that Hilda has come around on cyanide.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Goblin Market. And WHY SHOULDN’T HILDA BE A CONNOISSEUR OF POISONS?! SHE’S THE BEST! AND SO PRETTY I CAN’T STAND HER. AND DEFINITELY SHIRLEY JACKSON THOUGHT SHE WAS ON A DATE WHEN SHE ATE THOSE ALMOND COOKIES!


End file.
